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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the initial dispute over trademark: The "desk" part of the name is 'descriptive' and so isn't the strong part of each trademark. The "zen/fresh" parts are arbitrary so are the strong part of each mark. These are distinct, so I don't think there is a valid claim to trademark infringement here. One could argue that "desk" is 'suggestive' in trademark law which makes it a bit stronger, but I don't think that would fly.

If one of the companies can show actual instances of customer confusion, then there may be a case as this is an important test in a trademark case.

The fact that zen haven't filed suit speaks volumes.

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Absolutely. And zendesk is a play on "help desk" anyway. Now the paring of those two words together means something and a rip off might be closer to something like "zendeskr" etc.

And of course there is a long history of companies doing similar things. Say ending a domain in "ly.com" as only one example.

It's not all about a name. Freshdesk is an embarrassing copy of Zendesk.

A lot of successful products are copies of something else, and more power to them. The company I work for* had a competitor make an "embarrassing copy" of our flagship product, and they managed to get acquired because of it. But you know what? I don't hold it against them, in fact, congrats to them. If anything it validates the space we're in.

* I'm deliberately not mentioning the company or product by name, because I don't particularly want to start a subthread about this situation - the particulars would detract from the point I'm making.

Does your company's competitor copy even your visual design? What I see here is some bullshit makers trying to promote their product by trolling. This is not the common case.

By the way, I'm not against copying. I distribute my website, multiplayerchess.com with WTF License to let people clone it easily.

Again, what I see here is bullshit. It's unethical, it's not honest.

Yes, the copying was primarily of visual design. Of course, in our opinion, it's a poor copy, but they got acquired and we didn't, so who's to say? I just don't see how it's unethical to try to improve on what someone else has done, which I'm sure is how companies in these situations think of themselves.

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